Digital cameras have made it ridiculously easy and cheap to hold down the shutter button until your finger aches. A couple hours of landscape photography will rack me up a few hundred images. A good day of bird or wildlife photography tallies up more than a thousand clicks. And at the top of the “spray and pray” spectrum, I crank off two or three thousand photos in a single, maniacal day of shooting outdoor adventure sports such as whitewater kayaking.

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Now, I’m no mathematician, but when I multiply the number of days I shoot each year by the average number of photos clicked per day, it equals about a quarter million photos in a year. Oh my! That’s not only a blue whale worth of photos to weed through, but also terabytes of data to choke up my hard drives.

I know photographers who never delete a single photo, including one columnist for this very magazine …

To read more of this column please pick up the Fall/Winter 2016 (#39) issue of OPC. Or to never miss an issue please SUBSCRIBE today!